After four months of development, the amaroK team has finished the new stable release of the popular KDE based audio player. amaroK 'Airborne' introduces the highly anticipated Wikipedia lookup feature. The cooperation between KDE and the Wikipedia project has already been the topic of an earlier article.

amaroK is one of the first applications to integrate live information from the free encyclopedia, providing useful facts about the music you are currently listening to. Discography of an artist, biography and even photos are just a mouseclick away with the new Wikipedia tab.

Another major new feature is the integrated Podcast support. Podcasts are Internet radio shows; amaroK can play them live from the Internet, or download to your harddisk to enjoy them later.

The new Dynamic Mode automatically updates your playlist on the fly, adding music based on criteria you choose. You can start with a small playlist, and let amaroK generate a fresh stream of music infinitely. New tracks will be added randomly, from selected playlists, or based on suggestions from last.fm. This allows you to rediscover your music-collection in a completely new way.

Everyone loves eye candy, so we made these pretty screenshots, showing amaroK 1.3 in action.

Helix engine. Using code from the GPL Helix Player, it allows amaroK to play using the codecs of Real Player or Helix Player.

New Playlist Browser, powerful and easy to use.

Cue file sheet support.

Dynamic playlist mode.

PostgreSQL database support.

Much extended DCOP scripting interface.

Multiple analyzer visualizations for the playlist window.

Editable Smart Playlists.

Podcast support, including live streaming and download capability.

Crossfading for the xine audio backend.

Tarball and binary packages for most distributions can be downloaded at amarok.kde.org

Release Schedule and Future Plans

As during the 1.2.x release cycle, you should expect new 1.3.x releases at the beginning of the week every two weeks. amaroK has a history of being punctual in its releases. There will probably be a few minor releases. These releases will have cleanups and bug fixes thanks to Users Like You writing useful bug reports, as well as minor (meaning, non-refactoring) feature enhancements.

After 1.3.x development is over, we will begin working on amaroK 1.4. From here plans become more tentative. One idea is to have amaroK 2.0's release be simultaneous as KDE 4.0, as we are looking forward to taking advantage of the new technology made available by Qt 4.0 and the potential of KDE 4.0 as soon as possible.

Stay tuned for the upcoming amaroK 1.3 Live-CD, soon to be released on amaroklive.com.

Yes, blame the guy's distro, why doncha. Actually, amaroK was unstable as all hell at version 1.2.3 on my (Gentoo) box, as well. 1.3 seems to be doing fantastically well, however. Using the xine backend, for reference.

Having tried Kubuntu I can say it's not only AmaroK who has problems in Kubuntu. I've never experienced them while using Gentoo. Yeah, I know it's probably unfair to blame solely the distro, it just might be bad luck, but it was only a suggestion after all ;)

I'd also like to say that I have heard of people complain about amarok instability and I think it really comes down to the engine/configuration you use.

I use amarok on gentoo and it's the best player I have ever used. It makes winamp look like a slow POS and that is GREAT. I don't think the person was flaming by saying that gentoo does things in such a way that it avoids many problems that your binary based distro does.

Just sharing my opinion (I listen to music constantly all day everyday with a 10K song play list and I don't crash)

That's really the only problem with Kubuntu in regards to stability is that last I checked they used the aRts backend by default. And yes, I did file a bug. :)

Not stability related, but they do confuse the heck out of our users by having musicbrainz enabled without MP3 support. I'd rather they would just remove musicbrainz altogether rather then distribute a shoddy version of it.

No, if you choose an unstable backend it may cause amaroK to crash. Rather reasonable isn't it. Myself, I have never had any problems with aRts, on all the official versions I have used. Except some occasions with SVN/CVS and alpha or beta versions and long ago with some but not all versions of 2.0.x and 2.1.x. So I can't say why people constantly complain about it. On the other hand, I currently have a setup making the Xine backend crash and burn rather fast(Since I don't use it I don't bother to fix it or upgrade). And the few times I have bothered to try Gstreamer I have been far from impressed about it's stability.

Yeah, but inotify is essential for having nautilus play nicely with the things happening to the filesytem elsewhere - and probably lots of other stuff... turning off inotify is stoopid, amorok should be fixed!!

Well, that doesn't answer my question. That article talks about inotify and dnotify. My question was "what's the difference between fam and inotify?". nd to continue: what about fam and dnotify? there seems to be three tools for monitorin filesystems: inotify, dnotify and fam. How do those relate to each other and what are their differences?

Strange, I have googled for it in the past, but I didn't come across any sites that really explained it. Sure, there were sites about fam, about inotify and about dnotify, but no sites that really talked about the differences between them.

Anyway, that site seems like it's something I have been looking for. Thanks!

The juke box yammi may not be widely known. I discovered
it recently and found it to be the only application of
its type that does the greatest number of tasks in the simplest
possible gui. It is also way faster than amarok and
so simple and intuitive to use. It is not yet a fully
developed kde app and lacks such features as systray support,
volume slide bar etc. But it shows the way, how efficiently
a gui can be designed to do lot many tasks in the most simple and
fastest way.

amarok has of late become cluttered, and the organization
of the music is not yet the most efficient. But that was what
I used until I found yammi. thanks to the developers.

I just downloaded and installed yammi, and I am astounding that anyone could say the ui is less cluttered than amaroK. Yammi has a few interesting features that amaroK lacks, like removeable media support and preview mode, but less cluttered and more simple and efficient? What are you smoking?

when searching for a wikipedia page amarok (or KDE future wp-API) should respect the current KDE users locale settings. If a page is e.g. in English and German I want to read the German one and do not want to read at the end:

Dunno, I spose a lot of people running a non-English desktop would still prefer to use the English Wikipedia, since it's much more complete. So I'd rather make it so that you can switch the language in the app.

i hope they made filtering lists faster...
if you have about 11k objects in your list, filtering freezes amarok for some secs.. very annoying... made me stop using the filter...

and about amarok not being stable.... it only got stable for me, when compiling myself and using xine... gstreamer seems to be rather resource consuming (short freeze in sound before fade on many boxes i know) and arts... well you all know arts :D

Seems like i'm living in a different world!
My collection exceeds 13K, and the filter is the fastest query i've ever seen since a long time! BTW this is the feature that incourages me to use amarok!
By

I reverted to 1.2.4 for the time being, because suddenly amarok started to name each playing track from a m3u file "Radiostream" and it did not use the title embedded in the m3u file anymore (when trying to play the m3u's on my own site: www.wilbertberendsen.nl/audio).

1.2.4 does display the titles. I will try to sort out and report a bug if I can find a pattern :-)